Paul Carlucci’s List of Must-Read Books Set in the Wild
By Swift Press
Paul Carlucci’s List of Must-Read Books Set in the Wild
By Swift Press
Throughout my life, I’ve had a cautious relationship with nature. I grew up in a small town surrounded by woods and water, but I was never much for camping, longing instead to move to cities, skateboard in the streets, and drink pints in bars with live bands and pool tables. But while I’ve lived in over twenty places across four countries, only a few have been cities, and over the years, I’ve learned to love hiking and camping and running with a dog down a pine-flanked, needle-strewn trail. Even still, nature really scares me. I’m afraid of falling off a cliff and getting compound breaks to both arms. I’m afraid of a bear slapping the face of my skull. I’m afraid of spiders and hornets and accidentally setting fire to the woods. And I’m afraid of drowning, that moment when you have no choice but to gulp water into your bursting lungs. When I was writing The Voyageur, which is largely set in the wilderness around the Great Lakes of North America, I drew on my experiences in nature—and my fear of it—to create some of the settings that Alex, the protagonist, has to negotiate. Trying to build detailed settings that give rise to a lot of atmosphere made me deeply appreciative of books that do the same, and I thought you might enjoy this list of five recent favourites. No compass required.
Paul Carlucci's novel The Voyageur publishes April 2024.
Thin Air: The most chilling and compelling ghost story of the year
Michelle Paver
£9.99 £9.49There are many degrees of settlement, from metropolis to campsite, but one thing they all have in common is the confidence they tend to inspire in their residents. If we’re in a city, we feel a sort of power in numbers not just from the people we interact with directly but also the people we sense behind the walls of malls and offices and houses and apartment buildings. They’re the felt unseen, and while some of them might pose a threat themselves, the mass of them helps us forget the dangers we’d face in a wilderness devoid of any kind of settlement at all. Meanwhile, whether inner-city skyscraper or pine-frond lean-to, structure has a similar effect on our egos. Puffed up with settlement confidence, we might feel emboldened to stride into some wilderness and bring it to heel, but for most people, that’s just hubris, because alone and far from shelter, the threat possibilities stop being other people and become something else entirely—even something we might normally consider unreal. Right from page one, Michelle Paver’s Thin Air makes man’s hubris in nature its primary theme. Historical fiction by way of a ghost story, this amazingly atmospheric novel follows five men as they set out to climb Kangchenjunga in the Himalayas in 1935. Of these five, two are brothers: Kits, obnoxious and overconfident, and Stephen, our narrator, no stranger to confidence himself. They’re following in the footsteps of the infamous Lyle Expedition from a few years earlier, a climbing effort that only one man survived. As they work their way up the mountain, tensions and divisions grow, and the group comes across foreboding remnants of the Lyle effort, both physical and, after a while, not. Paver does an amazing job bringing us up the mountain with Stephen. We’re cold, bored, exhausted, and, increasingly, scared. We wish we stayed home. And when things come to a head, like Stephen, we’re left regretting our choices and longing for the comforts of civilization.
Semiosis: A Novel of First Contact
Sue Burke
£10.99 £10.44In this novel, which is more like a collection of linked short stories, a ship of specialist colonists has fled a devastated Earth in the hopes of reseeding humanity on another planet. While they’re cryogenically frozen, their ship’s AI identifies Pax as a suitable candidate for a new beginning. The planet is lush with life, both plant and animal, and as the newcomers go about rebuilding society, attempting to adhere to a peace-engendering constitution, they expand outward from their landing site. Except there’s already a war going on here, and it’s a battle between plants, which are more dominant than Pax’s animals. The colonists form allegiances with the plants that don’t trick them with poisonous fruit, and after meeting a rainbow bamboo that communicates with them, they attempt to strike a partnership and expand their footprint on the planet. But as the linked stories continue—and as we move through numerous points of view, including that of the bamboo, across multiple generations—we see that another non-plant alien species has already attempted this on Pax, but to no long-term avail. While this book’s fragmented structure leaves a lot of the characters’ conflicts either unresolved or resolved on the sidelines of some other focus, it nevertheless finds propulsive force in its themes and multi-generational mysteries, particularly those of a more political nature. It can be tempting, these days, to suppose we’d fare better if we could just move to the peripheries of our increasingly dysfunctional societies or leave them behind altogether. If we could only escape the corruption and self-interest of our so-called civilization, we’d be able to start again, in tune with nature and ourselves. What Semiosis and works like it often suggest can be summed up in the old adage against geographical cures for substance addiction: wherever we go, there we are. Organization is the key to species survival, but it’s also what gives rise to politicization. If we don’t work on solving our problems in the polities we already have—if we just ditch them, move elsewhere, and paper over the shame and pain with idealist tenets—we’ll end up back where we started socially, even if physically we happen to be someplace else.
Ghost Wall
Sarah Moss
£9.99 £9.49The landscape of rural Northumberland is brought to exquisite life in Sarah Moss’s Ghost Wall, a short but hugely impactful novel about seventeen-year-old Silvie, whose dad has taken her and her mom on an Iron Age re-enactment organized by an archeology teacher and a few of his students. Moss’s writing is wonderfully evocative. You can feel the tree roots under your feet. You can smell the heather baking in the sun. Her style is remarkable, simultaneously lean and expansive. Her use of similes is pretty spare, and when they do appear, they come quick but crystalized, as in gutted fish “opened like pages,” roots “like bird bones,” or a sleeping bag “curled up like a discarded snakeskin.” Throughout, rather than lead the reader’s attention away from the landscape and into abstraction, she keeps a tight grip on analogy, impregnating granular specifics into sentences with great rhythm and tone. When Silvie eats bilberries she finds on a hillside, she likes the “prickle of the calyx on my tongue, the way they burst in my mouth, the way you don’t know until then if it’s a bland or a sharp one.” Moss impregnates her sentences with just the right amount of authentic detail to give us a tangible setting that engages all our senses and roots us firmly in place. This clever use of language contributes to the book’s mesmerizing voice, and from it arises the role of wilderness in the novel (or one of them). The characters are pursuing their re-enactment near some peat bogs that preserved corpses from ages ago, mostly women and girls bearing the signs of the brutal, ritualized violence that led to their murders. Silvie’s dad, embittered and abusive, becomes increasingly swept up in the idea of role-playing one of those long-ago rituals, and we start seeing the bogs as a sort of amber conserving some of humanity’s least civilized practices, including the extreme patriarchal cruelty that was practiced right out in the open by whole societies.
The Wager
David Grann
£10.99 £10.44From their surfaces, glassy or roiling, to their depths, murky and cold, the oceans rank high among nature’s most awe-inspiring arenas, equal parts beautiful and menacing. They’re probably more inhospitable to people even than deserts (but thankfully, I have no real idea if that’s true). Over the past five or six years, I’ve read a lot of books set on or in the oceans—from Coleridge’s idiom-bestowing Rime of the Ancient Mariner to Julia Armfield’s eerie, achy Our Wives Under the Sea to Michael Creighton’s page-turning thriller Sphere, plus loads of titles in between—and I just love them. Give me towering waves and enshrouding fogs. Give me ice-locked sail-ships and castaways gone mad with hunger and scurvy. Give me depths that sunlight will never reach, the many atmospheres of crushing pressure a constant threat. The Wager by David Grann fits nicely on this little stretch of my bookshelf. It’s the fastidiously researched true story of a British shipwreck off the Chilean coast of the Patagonia in 1741. If you’re ever feeling a little uncomfortable at home, consider reading this harrowing account of not just survival in the wilderness but also life aboard an imperial warship; you’ll get cozy quick. Grann’s book has all the tensions of a novel, his research so exhaustive that he was able to build a narrative focused on people, relationships, and conflicts, all while vividly depicting settings both gorgeous and horrifying. The book has a lot of fascinating themes, but the one that resonated with me most is the way people cope with their estrangement from civilization by clinging to social practices, from classism to careerism, combatting the feral by insisting on the familiar. At the same time, Grann’s inclusion of the area’s Indigenous peoples shows how one culture’s unproviding wilderness is another’s backyard bounty.